Welcome to my Parlor Roller page. I am breeding from a family of birds that are down from what has become known as "The Miracle Baby". The above picture is of him. He got his name, because he was breed out of a 10 year old cock that everyone thought was infertile. My friend, Johnny Ajlouni, was able to get one fertile egg out of him and that was the first one out of the old man in a few years and the last one that I know of. "The Miracle Baby" looks almost exactly like his father. His father came from Ryan Grizzo, who got him from Norm McMurry, who got him from John Velencia?. They said that he was a 100 footer and I believe em. So far the "The Miracle Baby" breed a black pepperhead hen that rolled 121'6" and a black self granddaughter rolled 116'10". Both at the 2001 Great Western Pigeon Show in Watsonville, Ca. I also have a few of the Gamino Whites that have been rolling consistantly over 100 feet in competitions this year(2001) and am going to cross those in. I'm real excited about this breeding and hope that the outcross will produce as nice as birds as they are.

General Care of Parlors

One thing that I really like about the Parlors is that they are not that hard to take care of or breed. They are great parents and can feed their own young without any problem. They can be housed in lofts or cages that are not all that big and do not need a ton of room. This should make them attractive to people who are interested in pigeons, but do not have a lot of room to keep birds. I think that a good size breeding cage for one pair would be 2ft. wide x 2 1/2ft.long and 16in. tall. You can house your young birds, cocks and hens in seperate sections that are 2 1/2ft. deep, 3 1/2ft. wide and about 16in. tall. In a section this big I think you can keep about 8-10 birds comfortably. I have heard that a lot of people get out of parlors because they can not take the rolling in the cages and sometimes the birds will roll so much that they will rub all the feathers off their heads and look ragged. Well, I have to agree that this is not the kind of parlor you want to raise anyway. You need to find birds that do not have this trait. Sometimes a bird will become a mad roller and they should be culled. I find that if I move slowly and deliberately around the birds so that they know what I am doing, they do not roll in the cages. I also never fling the doors to their cages open and I let them know when I am around by wistling a little when I first go out to the lofts. I think that if Parlors are housed correctly(not in big open lofts,left on the floor)and you do not move abruptly around them, you will have very few mad rollers. I would like to end this section by saying that what I wrote above is just my opinion and some of things that I have tried. The great thing about raising pigeons as a hobby, is that you can virtually do whatever you want and this information is just that, information. Try some of it and use your own variations till you find what works best for you.

Performance

First let me start off by saying that I'm new to competing with the parlors. I have raised them off and on since I was a kid, but never really competed with them. I joined the American Parlor Roller Association and I started talking to a very experienced parlor breeder, Paul Gamino. I basically followed his advice this year and was able to get a few birds to break the 100 foot mark. This is what I did. And remember, there is more than one way to skin a cat. This is what worked for me, it may not work for everyone. First and formost, you have to have a lot of patience. Why, because you do not want to roll the youngbirds that you breed until they have gone through a full molt and even then you will want to wait till close to the show's to start rolling them. This was the hardest part for me, as I just wanted to know what the birds would do. The theory behind waiting to roll the birds till they finish their molt is that they need to develop fully to have the strength and power to pull off the long rolls. Some believe that the parlors only have a few(2, maybe)long rolls in them. Now this is not to say that you will not be able to breed a bird that rolls consistantly 50 feet, but this same birds may only roll 100+ feet once or twice in it's life. What I did this year was wait till about 3 weeks before the show to start training the birds. A friend and myself would take the birds and mark off a distance of 25 feet. One of us would roll his birds and if any of them made it out to the 25 foot mark, the other person would stop them. These birds would not be rolled again till the time of the show. Now I have to admit that some of the birds that I had roll the 25 feet in training did not roll much further in competion, and some of the birds that did not reach the 25 foot mark rolled much further than that when competing???? Go figure!!! this is what I love about the birds, you can experiment and try different stuff and hopefully one day you will come up with a system that works for you. That's about all I did as far as training the birds. The other thing I would like to touch on is the feeding. No big secrets here for me. I used a 14% pre mixed feed by a company called Winners Cup. I used this feed for all my birds and gave them fresh grit about once a week. Made sure that they had fresh water and cleaned my cages about once a week.